[0xbadcafebee]

Probably for the same reasons people use Java and Go instead of C. It's just more convenient sometimes. But sometimes not.

In terms of building a team at a company? In my experience it's been arbitrary. Manager / Lead has experience in language X, decides to hire people who also know it. Or all the other teams are already using language X. Or Manager / Lead has heard "X language is good at Y" and decides to go with that. Or there's simply 10x more engineers (and cheaper) available for language X than Y.

The times I've seen a language picked for a particular purpose:

- Perl/Python used for web apps. It's interpreted so you can just upload your source code and refresh your browser. Faster and simpler than having to compile/package it, lots of useful frameworks and modules, lots of developers.

- Erlang/OTP for telecom. Kind of on the nose, but there you are.

- C and C++ for embedded applications.

[mule1]

Yeah I get that, the same reason why I question some of the teams I've been on choice of JS frameworks, it's just what the developers were familiar with.

Go compiles so fast and reads cleaner imo, that I never saw the benefit of python. I always thought debugging python was clunky, could be unfamiliarity with interpreted languages. Also a few times I needed to use an ODBC driver with python left a bad taste in my mouth. But overall I get what you're saying, my new team writes all of their lambdas in python so I'm going to have to learn.